I'm Not Saying Sorry Anymore

I apologise a lot. For a lot of things. All the time. In fact I do more than apologise, I inhabit my remorse in a perverse drama of penitence and self-reproach. I won’t just say sorry and try and fix the problem, I will say sorry, and sorry, and sorry, and sorry again with more desperate adverbs. I will tell you that it was all my fault, no matter what has occurred, no matter how unlikely the scenario, I will find a way and make a leap of logic you can neither follow nor repute – and blame it all on me. I will tell you what a terrible person I was to have done this thing, and all the awful things that I deserve to have come my way for having done it. I will inform you that I have been a terrible person all along, a truly worthless and defective human being from the very beginning, sinking to even greater depths with each misdeed. I will beg you to never let me be trusted with the responsibilities that have gone so awry, and further apologise for ever attempting to rise above my station and dream of doing anything useful, helpful, meaningful or correct. I will plead with you to leave my presence, lest I fail you in such a manner ever again, citing my company as both unenjoyable and ruinous. I will abuse myself as I feel I deserve to be abused, the majority of it always taking place in my head, though very often out loud and sometimes even physically. My compunction is a passion-play.

You may think, from this, that I have done something truly unforgivable, something deliberately inexcusable and horrid – and truth is, I rarely have. The melodrama of my regret can be evoked by anything from burning dinner, messing up travel plans, losing money, not feeling like going out, forgetting to do a small favour, feeling sick, or just generally not living up to my expectations or those I feel others have. Sometimes I apologise just for being who I am. Basically, (despite the conception of this blog predating it) this comic is my life.

Source: http://brightside.me/article/stop-saying-sorry-if-you-want-to-say-thank-you-a-seriously-insightful-cartoon-57255/

***

I admire Johnny Depp a lot. Not for the reasons people might expect. Not because he is a great actor, or incredibly successful or attractive; but for his manner, for the way he conducts himself through life, or at the very least in interviews. It is obvious that at 52 he has seen a lot of shit. He has played a lot of amazing characters, met a lot of fascinating people, and experienced and sought out a lot of wild and crazy and incredible things. Read his Wikipedia page if you haven’t already, watch him play guitar with Marilyn Manson at this train wreck of a gig, watch him in one of his many manic roles, as Captain Jack Sparrow, The Mad Hatter or Willie Wonka, watch him in one of his debauched and destructive roles as The Libertine, George Jung or Hunter S Thompson. Then watch him be himself. Watch him in one of his interviews. Watch him especially, in this interview with Graham Norton where he talks about meeting Hunter S Thompson.

JOHNNY DEPP: Explosives with Hunter S. Thompson (The Graham Norton Show)

I am in awe of the way he delivers this story. Of the way he responds and reacts. The deadpan manner in which he lets it all unfold, like it isn’t remarkable in any way. He doesn’t get excited or florid and make a grandiose display of this party piece of a story – the best details are only revealed when he is asked, and he gives them plainly and without emotion, as if these things are nothing more than fact. It makes the story even more enjoyable, and the delivery even more noteworthy. There is all this crazy going on, in his experiences, in his characters and in his mind – and yet the way he conducts himself is so reserved. The control, the measuredness of self is absolutely astounding and worthy of reverence. He is so zen about everything, as though nothing could bother him and he has seen it all a thousand times before. It is as if he knows everything is going to be OK, and maybe takes a degree of wry amusement from things going to hell because so rarely does anything surprise him. He tells his stories without excitement, and seems to gain only a small measure of self-satisfaction at being so bemusing. He is so perfectly collected in his reticence.

Sometimes people tell me that I am reserved and calm and thorough and worldly. There is no hiding that I am “an old soul” as they say, but I feel like I am as far from calm and reserved as I could be. I am nothing like Johnny Depp. I get excited about far too many things; I relish in the delivery of my stories too much, displaying an unsavoury hunger for approval and fame; I fly off the handle about the smallest of things, becoming annoyed, angry and violent; I break under pressure and let the stress eat me from the inside out, caring too much and too little at the same time; I cry and scream and wail about my sorrow, inadequacy and fear; and I display no enticing mystery, ever airing my dirty laundry and yet not letting people in. I am a mess. We’re all a mess, yes. We’re all human and flawed and no-one will ever be as perfect as Johnny Depp in a rehearsed interview, and I’m sure Johnny Depp gets angry and upset and makes mistakes – but I could be doing a lot better.

***

Here’s the thing about guilt: it makes you feel good. I recently read an article that revealed guilt and shame activate the reward centre of the brain. Why? Most likely because guilt and shame both reinforce conformity and social cohesion, which lead to better outcomes for the human race as a whole. Basically they stop you acting like a dick that is going to die/not reproduce, or kill and/or stop other people reproducing. Guilt and shame are adaptive behaviours. Further research has proven this, showing that “(e)xpressing a desire to apologise (guilt) or feelings of worthlessness (private shame) resulted in more positive impressions… of moral character as well as likeability.” It would follow that you would have an easier time staying alive and finding a mate if you were well liked by those around you.

I don’t want to feel so guilty and ashamed, I don’t want to carry out this great performance of disgrace and penitence every time I do something even slightly disappointing – but I feel like I would be an arsehole if I didn’t. I feel if I didn't make a great display of my remorse, people would think that I didn't care that I had done something wrong; that I had no concern for their feelings and maybe even that I had done it deliberately. It's true that both ends of this are an exaggeration, I feel and display my self-reproach too strongly and I fear that people will react more negatively than they probably would in reality. But it doesn't break the cycle. It doesn’t undo the fact that it is addictive. That I am addicted to feeling guilty. That in some way, at some point, performing my great exhibition of self-flagellation brings me more enjoyment or maybe just less pain than one simple apology and an attempt to rectify the situation would. Do not think that the whole exercise is merely a way of avoiding cleaning up my mess, and making right what I have done wrong, this is very far from the truth. I always attempt to fix the problem, I just rarely find this to be enough recompense. I feel I must do every bit of apologising and displaying of regret we have discussed and then suffer while I fix the problem, somewhat deliberately making it harder for myself to fix it. My penitence is not merely making amends, but making amends whilst suffering and with difficulty. I'm not sure what informed this mode of thinking. Maybe I think I'm worthless or that I'm a bad person and I deserve it, maybe I think other people want to see me suffer, or that it makes them feel better about things to see me do so, or that it adds more credence to my remorse or my reparations if I suffer in addition.

It's certainly become more of a habit as time has gone on, and most especially with Dorian. I never just apologise. I lay bare my guilt and shame with ever greater histrionics. I don't know why or when it started. It wasn't because of anything he did; not because he expected it of me or ever questioned my sincerity, or because of some particular event. But now it feels like it's the only way I apologise with him. It probably just went along with the worsening of my depression. But maybe, horribly, selfishly, I started doing it because it was adaptive, because it got the best response out of him, because for whatever reason things turned out better for me for having done it – because if I got upset enough, the original problem ceased to matter. And then it just snowballed, and it’s just not helping anyone.

We talked about it, and he agreed, that I was probably apologising like I do because it was adaptive for me in our relationship. It’s a horrible thing to realise, that you’ve been doing that with your partner. When we took our break a few years ago, I said then that we both had issues, but that the problem wasn’t all the issues, but rather the fact that they intersected badly. Individually we weren’t fatally flawed, but when we got together we really set off each other’s weaknesses. It was true, but I could never give a concrete example. My tendency for hysterical over-apology and his tendency to allow all problems to be swept under the rug in response to it – was one of those things. I am appalled that I was a part of that behaviour, and I’m relieved that we can finally pin it down, but I am also dumfounded that it took us about three years to recognise it.

Neither of us ever wanted things to be that way. I never used to apologise like that with everything and everyone, and he never wanted me to respond in that way. He doesn’t want me to kill myself over every minor infraction or mistake, and I don’t want to either.

When we were on holiday in Japan recently we took too late of a train to a reservation we had made at a fancy hotel. The kind of fancy hotel that takes your $600 even if a natural disaster blocks your path. I lost my shit. There was no way we could make it in time and we were going to lose far too much money than I was able to cope with the prospect of losing. I hyperventilated and cried and had a panic attack. I could not contain my terror and disappointment and hatred of myself for having fucked this up. I had a truly worrisome outburst and then literally crawled into a ball and hid in the darkness under my cardigan wishing to die. Later in the trip we got on the wrong train again and ended up about 50kms in the wrong direction from the place we were meant to be with no way of getting there on time. Again I had an attack of panic and self-destructive behaviours. Then lastly, right at the end of our trip, the journey planner betrayed us and put us on a slow train that terminated in the middle of nowhere with no way of getting to the hotel before midnight, at which time our room would be reassigned to more organised travellers. We were helped out by a very kind man with a long and unpronounceable name, who spoke fluent American English and asked us to call him Mike. He helped us get a taxi to the hotel and even made sure we were undercharged on the fare. He was a real lifesaver. Thank you, Mike. In fact, in all of those disastrous times desperate emails and the kindness of strangers saved our arses, and we never had a room taken from under us, a planned visit missed, or a cancellation charge debited. But the fact that things did, and tend to, turn out for the best didn’t stop me physically and emotionally abusing myself for the fact things went momentarily awry.

We got back to the airport hotel, the last of the trip, at about 1 am. I was so full of rage and fear. I thought maybe I should take a walk, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t have a swim in the pool or have a bath either. I truly can’t describe what it is like to be so full of such intense and unpleasant emotions and then for the situation to resolve and have nothing you can do with them. My world came crashing down on me, and in the middle of it I realised I had been a terrible travel companion. Despite saying that I had worked through so much of depression, I had been worse on this trip than any other time previous. On top of everything else I was crushed by how this must make Dorian feel. And most of all what he must think of me. So besieged and overloaded by my emotions, finally feeling like I had crossed a line where he must be considering leaving me, and feeling I now had nothing to lose – I asked him what he thought of me, when I was like this, at my worst. I prefaced the question with every scenario I had running around in my head. I filled each with the sort of feelings which put a person among ‘the worst of humanity’ – my own feelings. I wanted him to feel absolutely comfortable in telling me the truth no matter how bad it was, by laying out the most unforgiving assessments of the situation from the start, and letting him know I was fully prepared, nay expecting, to hear such things. I said he must be annoyed, that my depression must be so fucking annoying at its core. So inconvenient. He must wish that for once in my life I could get my shit together. He must wish I was a fully capable human who didn’t make so many disappointing mistakes. He must be so pissed off, but feel like he couldn’t say so. He must feel angry, frustrated, disappointed and tied down. He must wish I was different, and though he is bound to me by the duty of his love, not want to be with the person that I have become. I must scare him. He must be so tired of me. He must wish I would shut the fuck up about all of this. But I didn’t know what he really thought. I feared it was all these things and worse, but at the same time I could completely accept him feeling like that. No matter how vitriolic, we’re all human and we have our limits. And then I asked him, “What goes through your head when I fuck up and cry and scream and punish myself?” and he says, “I just want you to be happy.”

I sat there stunned for a moment. I had been completely unprepared for what he had said. It had literally taken me YEARS to ask. I had been so scared of finally knowing how he felt about my mistakes and my emotional outbursts. And he just wanted me to be happy? I burst into tears, again, and I bawled and bawled and bawled until my body couldn’t take any more crying. After all the horrible things I thought he must be thinking… this was too beautiful for me to cope with. They were happy tears. Tears of gratitude and disbelief. I had suspected the worst so intensely and for long I never considered there could be a nice sentiment at the root of it all. And for it to be this one. So pure and innocent and full of love, and obvious. It was too perfect to be true. Even knowing how rude it could seem, I told him that my disbelief was still so strong that I suspected he might have said it simply because it was the perfect thing to say. Like a line from a script. This is the thing to say to make everything alright. But he really meant it. He had never thought anything else. Just deep abiding sympathy for my condition and the sincere wish that I didn’t have to suffer it. I cried because I couldn’t believe he was real. That (although I disapprove of the wider religious connotations, there’s no other word) he was so saintly. His purity of heart could have driven me to tears on its own. And then the knowledge that someone like this was not only real, but had chosen ME, and my mistakes, for years, and chosen to marry me, and then I thought of the disparity of virtuousness between us… I broke a thousand times that night and was put back together. Why had I waited so long to ask?

***

Sky Ferreira - Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)

How did I get here? There. Apologising for the millionth time, screaming in the kitchen about how I should be put down like a defective animal, cowering under my cardigan on the train, bawling into Dorian’s shoulder about not deserving his decency? On that train, under that cardigan, I asked myself why I felt so bad about my error. Why it made me want to crawl into a ball and die, why I felt the world should open up its great maw and swallow my pitiful carcass for such transgressions against human potential. And I realised, I feel like no-one ever really tells me that I’m doing a good job. When I started freaking out about the hotel reservation I didn’t hear that it was just one small detail out of a whole great big holiday where inevitably not everything could go to plan; that I was a remarkable and awesome human for being able to plan so much and have so much work so well; that many totally normal humans would have never been able to manage this and would have employed the services of travel agent instead, who would have had things go wrong for them too. I wasn’t reassured that I had a great reserve of moxie and aplomb and that I would find our way out of this the best that I could, and that everyone around me would be proud of me and grateful for my efforts no matter what happened. Or at least, even if these things had been said (and I’m told they were) I didn’t hear them.

I’m just looking for approval. I’m not too proud to admit it. I think we all are, in our own ways. I feel like no-one ever tells me that what I’ve done is good enough, that I’ve done well, that I can stop. I could always have done more or done better. There is never any endpoint. There is no fulfilment. Far from being instilled with a sense of ambition and striving, I have been driven to the point where I will never feel any satisfaction and my quest for it will remain endless. I am like one of those vampire myths about unslakable thirst.

I remember how disappointed and yet secretly pleased I was when I got a decidedly mediocre ENTER score (university entrance test result). I felt like what I had suspected and feared all along had finally come to pass. I was ordinary. Decidedly ordinary. By people’s expectations of me, and by my own, I had failed. And it felt like a glorious ‘fuck you’ to all that bullshit. “See! I told you I sucked! I told you not to expect so much of me! I was right that I was wrong! Up yours!”

Two finger salute.

It felt like an endpoint. I could finally stop trying. I had tried, and I had failed. I was a failure. End of. It didn’t feel good, but it was nice to fuck up some expectations and get to wallow in that lull. “Being a fuckup” was something that seemed to exist. It was achievable. “Being a success” was as intangible as a mirage. It also felt fulfilling in a way. Like I had finally fulfilled all those pessimistic prophecies. Everything awful I had ever done had been pointed out to me endlessly, almost always by my mother. And I had developed such a keen sense of worrying, pessimism and anxiety (thanks to her) that I was always filled with my own worst case scenarios and feelings about what a fraud and a failure I was. To constantly feel like dirt was normal. To have the self-confidence that you could amount to anything was unacceptable hubris. Penitence is all my mother ever taught me how to do. I feel like this is best explained by a poem I wrote a couple of years ago.

Old Money

Who taught me to love the scent of bills in a wallet?
Is it because I was poor?
Is it because my mother didn't love me more
Than the money, that I owed for the childhood
She cursed me into awareness of?
Yes, I was her saviour and her slave
Half the product of a man-

Made her own dissatisfaction
Realised and fed
Like she was dropped on the head
By her dragon of a mother
And they have problems she’ll never solve
Or avoid so she might die before I’m old
Never burying the lies that I still get sold

And though I could trace the blame for my sin
Picking backwards from the line of my kin
To the one that never smiled
She remains no catalyst of time
In a lack of progression
I am the form of the confession
At the end of a series that never looked back on itself

Is that from where I now draw my wealth?
As a writer of useless rhymes
Doomed to pass the time
Sitting in cramped little libraries
With lesbian women and their cats
Drinking from Styrofoam cups
Refusing to enjoy their retirement

And I tell them that I’m no-one
But the truth is that I’m tired of it
It makes me so depressed
To see so little come of anyone’s best
For them to have lived so long
And have such ideas
About what to do with the rest

But the answer is that I don’t know
Whether you should hang on to your impossibly stupid dream
Or let it go
And I can’t tell whether it makes me sick
Whether the Narcissus
Convincing these spinsters
Is a genius or a dick

Yet I work for the ones
Who recruit for my three years of stagnation and crisis
And I sit behind a woman posing as mother Isis
With her sickening Venn diagram of selection
Telling bright and valuable eyes
Between your likes and talents
Lies perfection

But if I could have had all that
I would’ve known it was all crap
My circles are on different sides of a gulf, a big and nasty void
These things that I’m great at
Which I’ve never enjoyed
And these things that I love
Which will never see me employed

And the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do
Is where neither of these things are true
My impossible obstacle of a voice
Bleeding talent in every way but song
Finding I’ve found my way in all ways
Except the one that matters
Is it all revenge, just a generation latter?

So now with her fingers down my throat
She says “I never meant to make you choke.”
And can I blame her for what she didn't know how to do?
If I had a sister would she be a singer,
A lawyer, a liar or at least her heart's desire?
Would either of them learn?
Would they ever understand for what I yearn?

They’re all so different but the same
These three layers of demons from my mother
Found the easiest way from one place to another
Like a pin through a paper folded thrice
Stabbing into the recesses of my life
Sadly my ego was a gift my mother never got
Which she planted, blossomed, crushed and rot

Every bad note was yet another misery
So eventually I quit, because of being shit
I guess I’m not as stubborn as I thought
To have lost the battle with demons that I never knew I fought
And all I ever wanted was to give up
So now I sit here, with murky coffee in my cup
And am I really better?

I guess it doesn't matter
That I’ll never make any money
To not have the scent of bills in my wallet
If it’ll never make me happy

I realise now that the last line is not merely, and maybe not even primarily, a dismissal of money as a source of happiness – but a resignation to the fact that with all that I have been made to suffer, no amount of money could make me happy. ‘What use is money if you are not capable of happiness?’ The bad things in my life have always taken centre stage, and now they’re all I can see, even when the good things are pointed out.

My ex, Damien, was pretty decent at reassuring me of my capabilities when I was feeling like shit. Of the many million ways in which he utterly failed as a partner, he was there for me in this way. But these days, I don’t feel like I have that balm from the people closest to me. And it’s mostly my fault. I got worse. I started fucking up bigger, but more importantly I started seeing things in a worse light and hating myself more and more. So much so that now any suggestion of my worth is taken as a challenge to shoot it down. You can’t tell me anything nice about myself because I will worse than not believe you, I will attack the statement and possibly even what I see as your delusions for thinking it. There is only so long that a person can persist in trying to convince another that they are worthwhile before it becomes heartbreakingly futile. Pessimism is so deeply ingrained in me it is unfathomable.

I don’t want the times when people told me I was capable and wonderful to be nothing more than memories. I despair ever more that I have become the kind of person who so rebuffs all attempts to elevate them that people no longer try. It only ends up fulfilling another one of my pessimistic fears, that I am not good enough and not deserving of praise. If I stop people telling me that I’m a good person, then I can jump up and say, “See! Nobody ever tells me I’m a good person because I am shit.” And when you look at it that way, maybe this is what I wanted. The horrible depressive part of me wanted to drive everyone and their compliments away so I didn’t have to struggle to reconcile the two any longer.

I recently told Dorian another one of my worries to do with our relationship that I’d been struggling with for a very long time. I feel like it took more courage to say than I believed I had. I told him that part of me didn’t want us to be together anymore. I felt like being together was making managing my depression harder, and I would be better off on my own. I had concluded 3 things over the long course of my soul-searching: 1. I wanted things to be better than they are. 2. Being alone would make being depressed easier. 3. There was almost certainly nothing wrong with the way we conducted our relationship. So I basically wanted to leave, but had no real cause to do so, and I felt insanely guilty about thinking of leaving. I thought Dorian would be immensely hurt. But he surprised me, as he often does, and took it all in his stride. He saw right to the core of it. He said, “You’re right, with what you say, it probably would ‘make being depressed easier’ – but that’s just it. It might feel a bit less painful, but overall it would make it easier to be depressed. You wouldn’t be hurting anyone else, but you wouldn’t have much of a reason to get better either.” And he was right. We agreed I wasn’t saying that I was sure that being alone would make me happy. I wasn’t sure anything would. I was just seeking to avoid other people’s expectations and potential to be hurt by me, but in doing so I would take away all of their potential to help me. It was classic depression motivated withdrawal, I guess. I feel pretty daft for not having spotted it earlier.

So I’m not ditching my friends to live in seclusion, just me and my black dog. And I don’t want this to turn into one of those bullshit feel-good “10 Things You Must Know If You Love Someone With Depression” click-bait articles either. But I am I’m trying to make a resolution. A series of resolutions. I want people to be able to compliment me and tell me that everything is OK again. I want to hear those things, and I want to believe them. I want to stop apologising with self-flagellating compunction. I want to let you know that this is what I’m going through and what I’m trying to achieve, because it’s very difficult to feel like you have permission to do something like this. I’m going to feel like an arsehole. I’m going to try and hide. I’m going to rebuff your compliments. But please don’t stop trying.

I’m not saying sorry anymore.

Don’t make it easy for me.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Done All Wrong